Daksha Patel

Daksha is a Manchester based artist whose practice encompasses drawing, printmaking, animation and installation. Her work engages with systems of measurement, mapping, and technologies for scanning the human body and its interaction with the environment. Residencies and research within scientific institutions regularly inform her practice; they include The Christie Hospital (2010), Laboratory Life, Arts Catalyst (2011), FACT (2013), Neuroscience at Kings College (2014), and Imaging Science at the University of Manchester (2016). She is intrigued by what remains immeasurable, illusive and unseen, despite our increasing capacities to visualise and gather data about the world around us.

The process of drawing – with its simplicity, immediacy and directness – is at the heart of her practice. She experiments with materials that are unstable and fugitive such as animal fat, vellum, clay and latex, to investigate ideas about unpredictability and the unknown, as well as working with graphite on paper to examine the relationship between drawing and measurement. Ultimately, she is interested in exploring what a drawing can reveal that a scientific document cannot.

Recent solo shows include ‘Noisy Bodies’ (2015) at John Rylands, Manchester, (featured upon Axisweb), and ‘Bodytopos’ (2014) at Touchstones Rochdale, (featured on the weekend Guardian). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Imperial War Museum North (2014) as part of the Asia Triennial, and the Wellcome Trust exhibition ‘Brains: The Mind as Matter’ (2013) at the Museum of Science and Industry. She is an AHRC practice-led researcher at Northumbria University, and gained her MA at Manchester School of Art in 2008. Her work is in public and private collections, and she is currently (2016) producing an animation for a University of Manchester Art/Science collaborative award.